Mark your City Safe Campaign for women's safety inaugurated in Pune

A unique "Mark your City Safe Campaign" for womens safety was inaugurated at the hands of Padmashree Lila Poonawalla at MCCIA Auditorium.

Pune-based SmartCloud Infotech, which developed the "Nirbhaya: Be Fearless " app last year, organized a special two-day event recently on women's safety and technology .

Former U.S. Marine and expert in personal safety training Melissa Lee Ohm, Founders of SmartCloud Infotech Gajanan Sakhare and Ajit Patil, Shabnam Asthana, Director National Executive PRCI, and a member of the core team were present on the occasion.

Melissa Lee Ohm gave a demonstration on personal safety to female students from various colleges.

Speaking on the occasion, Lila Poonawalla said it is good that the awareness on women's safety is increasing. However, men should also be a part of women's safety, and this should start right from the studentlevel.Both boys and girls should be taught the importance of why they should respect each other, she added.

Gajanan Sakhare said that "Mark your City Safe Campaign" is an advancement of "Nirbhaya: Be Fearless."

"This feature is important because it can tell which areas in the city are safe and unsafe according to people. One will have to download the free Nirbhaya App currently available for Android phones and participate in the "STAMP Feature," Sakhare said.

"Then the user will have to stamp an area as safe or unsafe based on certain criteria's. Over a period of time, users will start to see clusters with different coloured labels as we see on internet heat maps. Red coloured labels will denote unsafe while green will denote safe areas. The app will also notify or send a pop up if a user is nearby an unsafe area," he added.

He said: "We don't want to leave the initiative at that but we want to make it an end to end solution. We are already working on designs of some small wearable gadgets for women . Once we receive the patent we will bring them for use. Also Human interaction is necessary in cases of emergency. So we plan to have a 24x7 call centre in Pune to start with which can be trained to respond in emergency / SOS situations . We are talking to all the stakeholders involved in emergency situations like NGOs ,Ambulance Services, Volunteer Groups and the police."

He said: "To make these things a reality,apart from our technological expertise, we have onboard former US Marine and expert in personal safety training Melissa Lee Ohm, who has served in Iraq and Afghanistan, and has a vast experience in personal safety training. Peter Relan a serial entrepreneur from Bay Area US and his incubator program called Studio9+ has invested in smart cloud and will help in desgining effective wearable gadgets."

"This is a laudable and much needed initiative. It's about time we shaped our emotional responses and outrage at every heinous crime against women into practical solutions to prevent those. With this initiative I see great hope." said Shabnam Asthana.

Various volunteers who contributed to the campaign were felicitated at the hands of Lila Poonawalla.